In the Balance (53 page)

“Right, Max,” Jäger said, smiling a little in spite of himself. He hadn’t fought side by side with any Jews since the First World War; he had no great use for them. But the Russian partisan band sprawled in the dripping woods with him was more than half Jewish. He wondered whether the Ivans back in Moscow had set it up that way on purpose, to make sure the partisans didn’t think about betraying Stalin. That made a certain amount of sense, but it was also likely to make a fighting unit less efficient than it would have been without mutual suspicion and, on the Jews’ side, outright hatred.

The Lizard panzer’s machine gun stopped spitting flame. It swung away from the woods; Jäger envied the turret’s quick power traverse. If he’d had himself a machine like that, now, he could have accomplished something worthwhile. It was wasted on the Lizards, who, had hardly a clue about how to exploit it.

The tank wallowed forward through the mud. Jäger had made the acquaintance of Russian mud the previous fall and spring. It had done its best to glue his Panzer III in one place for good; he was not altogether disappointed to watch it give the Lizards trouble, too.

His attention shifted from the tank to the trucks and soldiers it was guarding. The trucks, like any wheeled vehicles, were having a lot of trouble in the mud. The NKVD man back in Moscow had been right; they were unusually heavy. Every so often a Lizard soldier, looking even more alien than usual in a shiny gray suit that covered him from toe claws to crown, would go over and put something—at this distance, Jäger couldn’t tell
what—into the back of a truck.

I hope we don’t have to hijack a vehicle
, he thought. Given the state of what the Russians, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, called roads, he wasn’t sure the band
could
hijack a Lizard truck.

From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. Others started to run, while still others, wiser or more experienced, flattened out on the ground as human soldiers would have done. The glass blew out of a truck’s windshield when a round or two struck home; Jäger couldn’t see what happened to the driver.

The commander of the Lizard panzer needed longer to notice the machine gun had opened up than he should have.
The Dwmmkopf
had his cupola buttoned up, too; Jäger would have demoted a man (to say nothing of blistering his ears and maybe his backside) for a piece of stupidity—or was it cowardice?—like that.

When the Lizard finally deigned to pay some attention to the machine gun nest, he did just what Jäger had hoped he would: instead of standing off and annihilating it with a round or two from his cannon, he charged toward it, his own machine gun chattering.

The German weapon fell silent That worried Jäger; if the Lizard got lucky with his own machine gun, the partisan band might have to back off and come up with a new plan. But then the concealed machine gun started up again, now firing straight at the oncoming tank.

Save as a goad, that was useless; Jäger watched 7.92mm bullets spark off the Lizard panzer’s invincible front armor and fly away uselessly. The popgun onslaught, though, was intended only as a goad, to make sure the enemy tank commander took the machine-gun nest too seriously to worry about anything else.

Georg Schultz let out a gleeful grunt. “God damn me to hell if he isn’t taking the bait, sir.”

“Ja,”
Jäger answered absently. He watched the panzer slog through the mud until it was just past the edge of the woods. Then its main arnament did speak, a bellow that made Jäger’s ears ring. Mud fountained up from just behind the German machine-gun nest, but the weapon kept returning fire.

Jäger turned his head to glance over at Max. “Brave men there,” he remarked.

The muzzle of the cannon lowered a centimeter or so, fired again. This time, the machine gun was put out of action—a singularly bloodless term, Jäger thought, for haying a couple of men suddenly made into mangled chunks of raw meat.

But Otto Skorzeny was already dashing forward from the birch trees
toward the Lizard panzer. The enemy tank commander must have been looking straight through his forward cupola periscope, for he never saw the big SS man pounding toward him from the flank and rear. Muck flying from his boots as he ran, Skorzeny covered the couple of hundred meters out to the panzer in time an Olympic sprinter might have envied.

The big machine started to move just, as he came up on it. He scrambled onto the rear deck, chucked a satchel charge under the overhang of the turret, and dove off headfirst. The charge exploded. The turret jerked as if kicked by a mule. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment. An escape hatch in the front of the panzer popped open. A Lizard sprang out.

Jäger took no notice of the alien enemy. He was watching Skorzeny leg it back toward the shelter of the woods. Then his gaze slid to Max again. “Fuck you, Nazi,” the Jewish partisan repeated. But even he saw that would not do, not by itself. Grudgingly, he added, “That SS bastard isn’t just brave, he’s fucking crazy.”

Since Jäger had thought the same thing since he met Skorzeny in Moscow, he declined to argue. Along with everyone else in the band, he grabbed his rifle, got to his feet, and ran toward the Lizards of the salvage crew, shouting at the top of his lungs.

The heavy protective suits made the Lizards slow and awkward. They fell like ninepins. Jäger wondered how safe it was for him to be tramping about with no more protection than his helmet, but only for a moment. Getting shot was a much more pressing concern.

“Come on, come on, come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the truck the German machine gun had shot up. It hadn’t moved since. When he got up to it, he found out why: one of the rounds that shattered the windshield had also blown out the back of the driver’s head. The blood and brains splashed over the inside of the cab looked no different from those of a human being similarly killed.

Having made sure the truck driver was in fact dead, Jäger hurried around to the rear of the vehicle. The latch there was very much like the one on an earthly truck. The partisans already had it open. Jäger peered into the cargo compartment, which was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran from front to back across the ceiling.

The mud-covered little misshapen chunks of metal that lay on the floor of the compartment seemed hardly worth the trouble to which the Lizards had gone to recover them. But they were what the raiders had come to steal: if the Lizards wanted them so badly, they ought to be worth having.

Along with his rifle, Max carried an entrenching tool. He scooped up several of those innocuous-looking muddy lumps, dumped them into a lead-lined wooden box a couple of the other partisans hauled between them. The instant he finished, they slammed on the lid. Three men spoke
together. “Let’s get out of here.”

The advice was, to say the least, timely. The Lizards had another panzer off in the distance, maybe a kilometer and a halfaway. It started churning toward them. In the same instant, muzzle flashes sprang from the machine gun on its turret. Bullets cracked past the running men. One of them fell with a groan. Long-range machine-gun fire wasn’t much good for taking out any particular individual, but it could decimate troops caught in the open. Jäger had fought on the Somme in 19l6. German machine guns then had done a lot worse than decimating the oncoming British.

Unlike those brave but foolish Englishmen a generation before, the partisans were not advancing into barbed-wire entanglements but running for the cover of the woods. They were almost there when one of the men carrying the lead-lined chest threw up his hands and pitched forward onto his face. Jäger was only a few meters away. He grabbed the handle the partisan had dropped. The box was astonishingly heavy for its size, but not too heavy to lift. Jäger and the Jew on the other side ran on.

The sound of dead leaves scrunching wetly under his feet was one of the loveliest things he’d ever heard: it meant he’d made it into the woods. He and his fellow bearer dodged around tree trunks, trying to take advantage of as much cover as they could.

Behind them, the Lizard panzer kept firing, but it didn’t sound as if it was getting any closer. Jäger turned to the partisan beside him. “I think the bastard bogged down.” The Jew nodded. The two men grinned at each other as they hurried away from the tank.

Jäger felt surprising confidence build in him. He’d thought of this mission as suicidal ever since the NKVD man proposed it back in Moscow. That hadn’t kept him from taking part; suicidal missions were part of war and, if they served the cause, were often worth attempting. But now he began to think he might actually get away with this one. Then—well, he’d worry about
then
later. He began to think he’d have a
later
in which to worry about
then
.

A whirring thutter in the air brought all his fears flooding back. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it was dangerous, he glanced over his shoulder. The helicopter swelled in the split second he watched it. Its guns started to chatter. Mud wouldn’t slow it down. Left alone, it could hover over the bare-branched woods and lash the raiders with fire until they had to give up their mission.

Wham, wham, wham!
From among the trees, a 2-centimeter antiaircraft cannon opened up on the helicopter. With its light mount, designed for mountain warfare, it had made up twenty-seven man-portable loads; Jäger had hauled one of them himself. It was a German weapon, served by a German crew: part of the reason the Soviets had been willing to include
Wehrmacht
men along with their own partisans in this band.

The Lizard helicopter just hung in midair for a moment, as if disbelieving the guerrillas could seriously attack it. It was proof against rifle bullets, but not against the antiaircraft gun’s shells. Jäger watched them chew it to pieces, watched chunks of metal fly from it at every hit.

Too late, the helicopter swung toward its tormentor. The 2-centimeter
Flak 38
kept pounding away. Like a sinking ship, the helicopter heeled over onto one side and crashed.

The raiders’ cheers filled the woods. Max pumped his fist in the air and screamed, “Take that, you—” Jäger couldn’t follow the rest of the Yiddish he called it, but it sounded explosive. The panzer major yelled himself, then blinked. Fighting alongside a Jew was one thing; tactics dictated that. Finding you agreed with him, finding you might even like him as a man, was something else again. If he lived long enough, Jäger would have to think about that.

Otto Skorzeny came dodging through the trees. Even filthy, even in dappled SS camouflage gear, he managed to look dapper. He shouted, “Move, you stupid fools! If we don’t get away now, we never will. You think the Lizards are going to sit there with their thumbs up their arses forever? It’s your funeral, if you do.”

As usual, Skorzeny galvanized everyone around him. The Red partisans undoubtedly hated him still, but who could argue with a man who’d just singlehandedly wrecked a Lizard panzer? The raiders hurried deeper into the woods.

None too soon—again Jäger heard the thuttering roar of helicopters in the air. He glanced back and saw a pair of them now. The Germans manning the antiaircraft cannon opened up at long range this time, hoping to knock down one in a hurry so they could fight the other on more even terms—and also hoping to draw both machines’ fire onto themselves and away from their fleeing comrades.

The helicopters separated, swung around to engage the antiaircraft cannon from opposite sides. Jäger wished the gun were a big 88; it could have swatted the copters like flies. But an 88 was anything but a man-portable weapon—it had a barrel almost seven meters long and weighed more than eight tonnes. The stubby mountain antiaircraft gun would have to do.

One of the helicopters blew up in midair, showering flaming debris over the woods. The other bored in for a firing run. Jäger watched tracers from the cannon on the ground swivel through a wild arc, then stab up at the second helicopter while tracers from its machine guns stabbed down.

The 2-centimeter
Flak 38
suddenly fell silent. But the helicopter did not go on to pursue the partisans. A rending crash moments later told him why. The gunners had done their duty as well as they were able—better than
anyone dared hope when the mission was planned.

The partisan carrying the lead-lined box with Jäger was at the end of his tether, stumbling and staggering and gasping like a man breathing his last Jäger scowled at him. “Get away from there and put somebody else on that handle before you ruin the mission and get us both killed.” Only after he’d spoken did he notice the order in which he’d put those two elements. He grunted. In case he hadn’t noticed, that would have told him he was a thoroughly trained soldier.

The raider nodded his thanks and reeled away. Georg Schultz hurried up. “Here, I’ll take some of that, sir,” he said, nodding to the burden Jäger now held alone.

“No, let me.” It was Max, the foul-mouthed Jewish partisan: He wasn’t as big, probably wasn’t as strong as Schultz, but he’d shown himself to be wiry and tough. All other things being equal, Jäger would have preferred his tank gunner beside him, but all other things were not equal. The mission might depend on cooperation between surviving Germans and Russians. Having two Germans carrying the precious whatever-it-was inside that chest might make the Reds think harder about selling them out

All that ran through Jager’s head in a couple of seconds. He couldn’t afford to think very long; hanging onto the chest solo was hard work. He said, “Let the Jew do it, Georg.” Schultz looked unhappy but fell back a couple of paces. Max took one of the handles from Jäger. Together, they started moving again.

Even as he trotted beside Jäger, Max glared at him. “How would you like it if I said, ‘Let the fucking Nazi do it,’ eh, Mister fucking Nazi?”

“That’s Major fucking Nazi to you, Mister Jew,” Jäger retorted. “And the next time you want to go swearing at me, kindly remember those flak men back there who stayed at their gun and got shot up to help you make your getaway.”